Spring Garden (Japanese Novellas)

Taro, who grew up in Osaka and formerly worked in a hair salon, now works in a Tokyo office at a five-person company that manages PR for other firms. He is divorced and lives alone in an eight-unit apartment building, the View Palace Saeki III, in Setagaya Ward that is scheduled to be demolished. He has one friend, a co-worker who moves to Hokkaido during the course of the novel. Ten years ago his father died and Taro keeps the mortar and pestle in which he ground his father's bones in a kitchen cabinet:"The mortar and pestle never got moved," Tomoka Shibasaki writes in her novel Spring Garden. "Taro was a disorganized person, and he worried that if he moved it, he'd forget where it was. He also worried that if it wasn't somewhere visible, he would forget that his father was dead. Sometimes he got the feeling that he'd already forgotten—about his father's death, and about his existence too."Taro's building has eight units, four on the first floor, four on the second; these are identified by the Chinese zodiac: Pig (which is Taro's), Dog, Rooster, Monkey on the first floor, Sheep, Horse, Snake, Dragon on the second. Taro therefore thinks of the woman who lives upstairs in the last apartment as Dragon Woman who seems about his age, a little over thirty. Taro spots her on the street:"She was wearing a creased T-shirt and jogging bottoms, with a beanie that he guessed was to cover unkempt hair. It was not the sort of look you would go for if you were expecting to be seen by anyone. In fact, the combination of the hat and her black-framed glasses made her look pretty suspicious."Her surname is Nishi, and she tells him "my kanji looks a lot like the kanji for the Rooster." She is an illustrator and a comic-strip artist. "Her main jobs are "making comic strips out of readers' stories submitted to a job-seeking portal and a cooking magazine site, and individual commissions for magazines and adverts." She is single and independent and also apparently has no friends or family.Nishi is obsessed by a sky-blue house and its garden the View Palace Saeki overlooks. The house "looked like the sort of grand, Western-style mansions that had sprung up in certain areas of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The horizontal wooden planks were painted a vivid sky blue, and the roof tiles in terracotta, was a flattish pyramid, with a decoration at the top shaped like the tip of an arrow."The house was built in 1964 by a Taro Gyushima, an advertising director, and his wife, Kaiko Umamura, a stage actress. They had produced a coffee-table book of photographs titled Spring Garden about the house that Nishi first encountered in high school. That couple moved out years ago and are divorced. A young family now apparently lives in it.I've lifted three quotes from the novel to give you a sense of Polly Barton's polished translation and because Taro, Nishi, and the house are the novel's three characters. The book, which has no chapter breaks, flows smoothly from Taro's point of view to Nishi's. Confounding reader expectations (this reader's anyway), there is no romance between Taro and Nishi. They have meals together, they drink together (Nishi drinks far more beer than Taro), the eventually are able to visit the house's interior together, but there is no romantic spark, and Nishi eventually moves away from Tokyo.Tomoka Shibasaki was born in 1973 in Osaka and began writing fiction in high school. She graduated from Osaka Prefecture University and worked in an office while writing fiction. Her first novel, Kyō no dekigoto (A Day on the Planet), was published in 2000. In 2003 the book was adapted by into a film of the same name. In 2006 Shibasaki won a MEXT Award for New Artists for Sono machi no ima wa (Today, in that City). In 2010 she won the Noma Literary New Face Prize for Nete mo samete mo, a first-person story about a woman who falls in love, loses her boyfriend, then meets a man who looks identical to her disappeared boyfriend but acts completely differently. In 2014, she won the 151st Akutagawa Prize for Haru no niwa (Spring Garden).Spring Garden is an interesting novel because there is no conflict—unlike what they teach you in writing class. Taro does not seem to want anything, not even a closer friendship with Nishi. Nishi wants to see for herself the bathroom in the sky-blue house, but that does not feel like much of a goal and she hardly has to overcome real challenges to eventually reach it.Nevertheless, the book held my interest all the way through. (Pace, writing class.) As much as anything, it is a lament for a passing time. The sky-blue house will be torn down. The View Palace Saeki will be torn down. The neighborhood will change. Spring Garden turns out to be surprisingly moving.

The thing about many Japanese novels is that while you are reading them nothing seems to change much, but by the end you realize that the world shifted somewhere between the beginning and the end. Spring Garden is like that.Taro avoids doing anything that is a bother which is the reason his wife said she wanted a divorce. There are a lot of things Taro needs to do that are a bother--like move. One day his neighbor tells him of her obsession with a western style blue house that is across their courtyard. The neighbor's obsession becomes Taro's obsession. The neighbor lady is able to move-on after seeing what is to her the most important room in the blue house. Taro is not--at least while we know him.My reason for four stars instead of five is that about 1/3 of the way through the descriptions of the western style blue house with the Japanese interior drag on way too long. Very repetitive. Luckily, after the stutter the book moves on.Very enjoyable.

Wonderful little book! As other reviewers have said it starts out slowly but becomes strangely captivating for reasons hard to explain. I read this book in one sitting one lazy afternoon. The tale of a divorced Japanese man in his early thirties and his neighborhood life. Wish the book was longer as I see now why this book won the Akutagawa Prize. Highly recommend for someone looking for a pleasant read.Wish the author had more works translated to English.

Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki and translated by Polly Barton predominately takes place in Palace Saeki III, an apartment building in Tokyo. Each of the apartments in the building are named after an animal of the Chinese zodiac. The main character, Taro does not know the names of the other tenants and so he privately refers to them by the name of their apartment. There is Ms. Snake who lives upstairs and Ms. Dragon who he sees one day staring at the house next door. One day, he befriends Ms. Dragon who is really named Nishi. One night they go to a restaurant and she shows him a copy of the book, Spring Garden which is a book of photos taken by a famous couple who used to live in the house next door. Nishi is fascinated by both the book and the house and actually chose to live in the area because of the house.Taro and Nishi meet infrequently, but their conversations have an effect on the withdrawn Taro who begins to take more notice of his surroundings. He notices the empty apartments in the area and when empty houses are torn down. He remembers that something was there the day before, but he cant remember what it was.Spring Garden is well written and the translation reads very well. However, there is one three page section towards the end of the book where the writing changes from being the third person or the first person from the perspective of Taro to being the first person from the perspective of Taro’s sibling who comes to visit. The transition is confusing and I had to reread the paragraph more than once to figure out what just happened. And then the book reverts back to Taro again.I am not the biggest fan of this book. The book is basically a snapshot of the rather unhappy life of someone who takes little interest in his own life and lets opportunity pass him by due to his indifference. The book is well written, but I kept expecting something to happen. Maybe it would be some sort of epiphany for Taro who certainly needs one in his life. While this does happen to a minor degree, it is not enough to make the book interesting. The story has a lot of potential but it is never followed through on. But failure to take advantage of opportunity is also Taro’s life in a nutshell and maybe the plot of the story was meant to mirror of his life.

This is one of a series of Japanese novellas being published by the marvellous Pushkin Press. The central characer here, Taro, lives in Tokyo, mourning his father’s death and isolated after his divorce, he has a small apartment in a block that’s earmarked for demolition. As the building empties Taro becomes aware of the behaviour of one of his neighbours, she has a mystifying obsession with a neighbouring ‘sky-blue’ house. For a while Taro watches her watching it, until one day they meet. She is Nishi. Nishi’s an artist who has a story to tell about the blue house and its once elegant garden. After Nishi shares the story with Taro, he joins her in her quest to uncover more of the house’s secrets.I thought this was a gentle, atmospheric, beautifully-observed story. Although the mystery of the blue house drives the (slight) plot it’s as much about the nature of life in fast-changing urban spaces. Spaces in which our neighbours are often unknown or at most glimpsed through windows, and where demolished buildings represent the slow erasure of our personal histories, consigning the spaces of our past to spaces of memory. Shibasaki’s narrative is both elegiac and optimistic, reflecting on how where we live impacts on how we live and how we feel about our everyday existence. I really enjoyed this.

Enjoyed the observational nature of the book and how it captured time moving along...The book’s condition was a bit hit and miss for a used book in “good” condition not sure how the previous owner managed to mangle part of it but leave other parts intact.

A beautifully written exploration of urban loneliness, fleeting connections, and search for meaning.